Institutions of control are under attack – 09/04/2023 – Marcus Melo

Executive-Legislative relations under Lula 3 are still taking shape, but there is strong continuity with the previous pattern. It manifests itself from the leaders of the two Houses —which remain the same, Pacheco and Lira— to the established bargaining pattern. To speak of stubborn continuities is to speak of transformationism (in the original, non-Gramscian sense of the expression): stability based on a less than republican collusion of rivals.

This Lampedusian transformation manifests itself mainly in legislative and budgetary practices and is counterintuitive, considering the enormous electoral polarization and the trauma of the assault on the Praça dos Três Poderes. It even preceded the investiture of the government, with the approval of the ceiling-breaking PEC in the previous legislature.

The Executive’s toolbox is the same: it includes ministerial portfolios, amendments and second-tier positions, in that order of importance. According to an expert on the subject —former mayor Eduardo Cunha—, “positions do not have the same relevance as amendments. They go straight to the deputies’ base.

The ministries function as superaggregators of amendments and transfers to states and municipalities: it is a two-way street. They guarantee that the local interests of the governing coalition are directly mobilized, as shown by Fernando Meireles. The partisan distribution of the ministerial portfolio expresses a kind of Executive-Legislative fusion. The president’s degree of involvement in the process, through the Civil House or political coordination ministries, has varied.

The “new government’s secret budget” involves anabolized resources from the rapporteur’s amendments, which grew dramatically and were shared equally among deputies in the form of individual imposition amendments (which are outside the bargain) and amendments of free allocation by ministries, subject to bargaining with deputies and parties. It is now centralized in the Institutional Relations Secretariat, and is marked by opacity.

If Bolsonaro abdicated from managing the amendments, Lula outlined a centralizing reaction, but, in practice, the picture is also one of strong delegation. In both cases, the motivation is to shift the costs of deviations and systemic inefficiency onto parliamentarians themselves. Does not work. See the Juscelino affair.

Coalition presidentialism only works with institutions of strong control, as we show in the book “Making Brazil Work: Checking the President in a Multiparty System”. The current picture is one of weakening them.

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